Seymour Seeks End to Battle in Desert : Environment: Senator tours region and urges a compromise on a plan to create a national park.

KELSO DEPOT, Calif. — Sen. John Seymour toured millions of acres of California desert by foot, van and helicopter Saturday, declaring his determination to break a bitter stalemate over the creation of new desert national parks and wilderness areas.

At one point, Seymour encountered a rattlesnake, but he found the experience no more daunting than being in the middle of a rancorous political dispute over the best way to use and protect the vast desert lands.

The freshman Republican senator vowed he would try to achieve this year what his mentor and Senate predecessor Pete Wilson refused to do: carve a compromise with Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston and environmentalists for a new desert protection plan covering the arid, mostly empty and spectacular southeast corner of the state.

He said 1991 is the year to get such a plan through Congress and signed by President Bush.

“If we don’t make some very hard and tough political decisions now, we may end up destroying the beauty of California, and nobody wants that,” Seymour said after sleeping overnight in a tent pitched amid pinon pines at the Mid-Hills campground, 5,600 feet above sea level.

“Now is the time to do it,” he said. “The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be politically.”

But Seymour made it clear that he had made no major decisions on the key issues that have caused such animosity between Cranston and environmentalists on one side and desert users such as off-road vehicle enthusiasts, miners, cattle ranchers, the U.S. Department of Defense and rockhounds on the other.

He said he wanted to learn about the desert first and then to “build bridges” between the competing interests in search of a compromise. As a senator, Wilson refused to do that, saying that the Cranston plan, even if modified, would shut off too much of the desert to legitimate uses and leave it available only to a few backpackers.

Asked why he came to the desert, Seymour said it is one thing to read about the desert and be briefed on it--as he has--and another to “come here to breathe it, see it, touch it, feel it, sense it. That’s another experience and that’s why I’m here.”

About an hour later, Seymour came almost face to face with a three-foot rattlesnake along the remote dirt road to the campground. He did not flinch, in part because he was in a U.S. Bureau of Land Management van and also because he said he had seen a bigger rattler in his Sacramento back yard while serving as a state senator from Orange County before Wilson appointed him to the governor’s former Senate seat.

In meetings with competing major interests involved in the desert dispute Friday night and Saturday, Seymour mostly listened, but also also asked some probing questions.

Just the fact that he was willing to spend such time in the desert--and to promise to return June 8 to make up meetings he missed because of Friday’s trade vote in the Senate--was encouraging to a major advocate of the expansive Cranston plan, Peter Burk of Citizens for Mojave National Park.

“This was a great day for Mojave Park,” Burk said after a lunch stop at Kelso Depot, a historic railroad station 25 miles southeast of Baker and almost at the geographic center of the proposed 1.5-million-acre park.

To Burk and his allies at the Sierra Club, the new park--now administered as a national scenic area by the BLM--would be a keystone of Cranston’s plan that also would create 4.4 million acres of wilderness area out of mountain ranges now administered by the BLM.

But the BLM is fighting to retain control of the East Mojave and millions of acres elsewhere from Inyo County south to the Mexican border. Ed Hastey, BLM state director who served as Seymour’s tour guide, contends that much of the area is not suitable for national park or wilderness status. He argued that his agency is better able to accommodate the diverse interests of all Californians and other desert visitors, and provide adequate protection of the resources, than is the National Park Service, a sister agency within the Department of the Interior.

Burk’s group and the Sierra Club claim that only the Park Service will give the delicate desert region the protection it must have to preserve it.

If they were looking for clues from Seymour, both sides could have felt they scored some points.

For one, Seymour seemed particularly impressed with a presentation by ranchers who fear that creation of a park will force them out of business, some of them after generations of cattle raising in the East Mojave region.

The economy of the beef raised is not the issue, Seymour said. “It’s a way of life,” he said, and wondered aloud whether the environmentalists would be so quick to dismiss the importance of the ranchers if they were American Indians. One of the pro-park arguments is that stronger desert controls are needed to protect the rock carvings and other artifacts of prehistoric American Indian life.

But at another point, Seymour seemed impressed with the park proponents’ argument for saving unique lands for future enjoyment.

Chatting with reporters, he noted that California has passed 30 million in population and that millions more will be coming. There must be, he said, some “balanced way to save the natural resources of our state before we’re totally overrun.”

Seymour emphasized the importance of the moment--that the failure of the contesting sides to give a little may allow the opportunity for compromise to slip away.

Political observers believe Cranston may be in a somewhat accommodating mood in hopes of creating a new desert park and wilderness system as a legacy as he retires from the Senate after a long career clouded by his role in the Charles H. Keating Jr. savings and loan scandal.

A desert park breakthrough could give Seymour an important boost with environmentally concerned voters as he enters a tough 1992 election contest for the final two years of Wilson’s term.